A version of Flow— ProQuest ‘s cloud-based collaboration and document management tool—is now available for free to researchers, including those affiliated with non-subscribing institutions. Launched in mid-2013 as an alternative to Mendeley and Zotero, the platform helps researchers discover, store, and organize academic articles, citations, and metadata downloaded from electronic databases, and collaborate with other researchers in a cloud-based environment.

Multidisciplinary Open Access journal publisher PeerJ announced the publication of its first 30 peer-reviewed articles today. Co-founders Jason Hoyt, formerly chief scientist and VP for research and development for Mendeley, and Peter Binfield, formerly publisher of the Public Library Of Science (PLOS), launched PeerJ in June 2012. They quickly garnered support for the project, ultimately assembling an Editorial Board of 800 academics and an advisory board of 20—five of whom are Nobel Laureates. PeerJ is now hoping that its business model can help make academic publishing more efficient and less expensive both for both researchers and libraries.

Research collaboration startup Mendeley this week announced the launch of a new “what-you-see-is-what-you-get” (WYSIWYG) citation style editor that will enable users to format citation styles and then contribute them to an open repository where they can be reused by other academics. Produced in collaboration with Columbia University Libraries with the support of a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the new editor was developed in response to frequent requests on Mendeley’s user feedback board.